Thursday, April 23, 2009

Cary Grant usually sings a medley of old favourites when he's in the shower. Any requests?

Audrey looks stern, but she doesn't know what Cary's going to do yet. And Cary may look old, but there's some screwball zest in the man yet. Lest you think Hitch sucked it all out of him, but then Jimmy Stewart was the one who got mentally tortured, wasn't he? Cary just got terrorized by a plane and kissed by Grace Kelly. And Ingrid Bergman. Life is so unfair sometimes.

What were we talking about?

- How often do you go through this little ritual?

- Oh every day, the manufacturer recommends it!

- I don't believe it...

- Oh yes, it's true... Look... Wait a minute. Read the label! Look at the small print: "Wearing this suit during washing helps protect its shape."

I get the feeling that this scene is remembered purely for how bizarre it is- but then most of Charade doesn't really make sense. It's been said- exhaustively- that this is "the best Hitchcock film Hitchcock never made", but he generally did make some kind of sense even if he never explained, say, why those birds were pecking everyone to death. (That was kind of the point.) But apart from that, when did Hitch ever make as chic and frivolous a movie as this? To Catch A Thief, I suppose, but that's Hitch on a bad day and it's hardly his signature style.

I do apologise. I've obviously got Hitch on the brain. Now, I love Cary. And his mannerisms in this scene are really quite amusing. But clearly the best thing about this scene- and indeed the entire movie- is my beloved Audrey Hepburn. Isn't she just a peach? Adorable. The third panel here is the highlight:

Aww.

Oh, and Cary gets wet some more. This didn't really work out very well, did it? Sorry. Feel free to dissect the goodness/failure of this cross-generational pairing in the comments.

12 comments:

This is one of my all-time favorite movies, and this scene adds some fun comic relief to all the murder going on around them. I did read/hear(?) somewhere that they had Audrey be the one pursuing Cary because of the age difference. I would say it's definitely less weird that way.

I love this film. I immediately took up stamp-collecting after seeing it as a kid. "Charade" is up there with "How to Steal a Million" in my list of movies that I love primarily because Audrey Hepburn wears great outfits in them.

Seeing this movie was my favorite moviegoing experience ever-- an old-timey theater in Amsterdam with big red stairs and a balcony and everything was doing a Hepburn retropsective, and I ran to the theater by myself in a thunderstorm, and watched the whole thing from the balcony, soaking wet and grinning. Maybe I identified with Cary in this scene, and that's why I love it so much??